


i'll be your satellite

by blairbending



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: F/F, Jealousy, Pre-Series, Underage Drinking, Underage Sex, all the shit you would expect from this series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2018-04-24 15:23:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4924834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blairbending/pseuds/blairbending
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After her father leaves, Serena begins to burn a little brighter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'll be your satellite

**Author's Note:**

  * For [calisthenicswithwords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/calisthenicswithwords/gifts).



> Prompt: A pre-series fic that delves into Serena's tenure as Queen B and her relationship with her half-loving, half-jealous bff Blair.

Every morning when they get to kindergarten, Blair runs over to the little plastic play house. She takes possession of the white plastic chair that makes her legs stick, the blue plastic tea kettle that tastes like old Evian bottles, the red plastic flowerpot with its marbles for earth. She makes Serena keep house with her, orders her around and sends her out for snacks.

One day, Serena's nanny gets sick. Nate's parents have taken him to camp, and Izzy Coates cracked her head running on the sidewalk so she can't come to school that day. Left alone, Blair sits in that plastic house all morning long, not playing, not moving — not wanting to run the risk that someone might it away from her. She sits in the plastic chair with her little legs squeezed tight until she pees herself, and has to be taken home to change.

After Blair pees in the house, nobody wants to play with her. Except Serena — Serena, the beautiful and the brave. She drags Jeremy Scott Tompkinson into the house and makes him drink Blair's plastic water-tea with her. She makes them stop calling it the pee-house.

Of course, within a year Serena has forgotten the whole thing. But Blair never does. Even at four, she takes her debts seriously.

 

 

They are six when Serena's parents divorce. The night her father leaves, Lily asks Eleanor to take her for the night, and she and Blair spend an unnaturally quiet night together. They watch TV and go to bed early. After that, Serena begins to burn a little brighter around others, at school, at birthday parties. "She must be very lonely," Eleanor says, when Serena wears her skirt with the yogurt stain to school three days in a row and the parents start to talk. Lily has gone away and the nanny is busy with Eric, she doesn't notice these things.

The girls at school talk too. What they notice is that Serena is changing. Some part of her has turned inwards, and she is much quieter sometimes. Blair is reminded of what she has read about caterpillars, about frogspawn and tortoises. She wonders whether her friend is just hibernating, or whether she is in metamorphosis. Eleanor thinks differently — she thinks Serena might need help. When she thinks Blair is asleep, she and Blair's dad talk about child psychologists.

 

 

Over the next few years, Serena eats dinner at Blair's house a lot. Blair asks her parents, very seriously, if they will consider adopting Serena. She could share her room, she offers magnanimously. She could be her sister.

 

 

Serena brings a bottle of schnapps to Blair's eleventh birthday party. She whips it out of her purse and cracks the seal before anyone can protest, fixes her mouth to the bottle and takes a rather piratical swig. The whole party is planned out, games and music and little matching party favours. Come on Blair, Serena says. Don't be boring.

When they are all sick the next morning, so that Blair's bathroom reeks of sour peppermint, Blair tells her mother that it must have been the food. She thinks the quiche tasted funny. And the dip, Petra left it out on the table all night.

Eleanor shakes her head. Honestly, the staff in this city. She fires Petra, who has been with them since before Blair was born, and hires a housekeeper from a different agency. The new one is Polish. She asks after Blair's homework and scolds her when she leaves her clothes on the floor.

 

 

The girls at Constance go through crazes. Coloured chapsticks, cheap and waxy, smelling of candy and artificial fruit. Glitter putty, mashed into clothes and sticking tackily under fingers and nails. Then bracelets, hand-knotted, distributed to friends and ringing the arms of every girl in school. Blair's small, quick fingers make her the best bracelet-maker in the school. She is liberal at first, eager to show off, bestowing not one but three bracelets upon poor fatherless Serena, whose big blue eyes fill with tears. You're my best friend, she says. Blair's heart fills her chest and she feels on top of the world as she lovingly ties each one.

Before the week is up, Serena's wrists are crowded with fraying rainbow threads, more than any other girl in school. Blair quickly declares the bracelets stupid (wielding that week's spelling word, "unhygienic"). She snips all hers off and makes Iz and Kati do the same. But Serena is sentimental. She keeps her bracelets and carries on wearing them long after everyone else has moved on. Blair learns that generosity cannot be taken back. She begins to give more carefully.

 

 

At Lily's third wedding, they meet a boy called Carter who tells them that hotel bars never card. That year, Blair holds her birthday in a suite at the Palace. Carter brings booze and new friends. Jeremy Scott Tompkinson brings a girl called Georgina, who takes a sip from Carter's bottle of Hendrick's and looks at the bottle as if it has burned her. Sitting on the bed, Blair receives gifts like a stiff little empress, while the real queen mixes gimlets and sparkles from across the room. Serena makes Carter lick the lime juice from her fingers and laughs when he wants to kiss her.

Blair has never been kissed, but she wants to, badly. It's that evening that a girl in the bathroom shows her how to throw up.

A few months later, at another party, Serena meets a Boy, the first of many. She lets him kiss her, lets him do so much more than that. Afterwards, she ends up outside of Blair's building, God knows how. The doorman lets her up and she curls into bed beside her, hands and feet cold.

Blair wants to know, but hates having to ask. "How was it?"

Serena is in her underwear, because Blair's pyjamas are the wrong size to fit her. She doesn't let Blair touch her. "Good," she says bravely.

She holds Serena's hair while she pukes, strokes her head protectively and supplies mouthwash and cold water. Helps her do it right.

 

 

When they're fourteen or so, Serena starts hanging around Blair's house when her father is home. She wears a black bra under her school blouse and leans over the counter a lot, laughing at his jokes until Blair is embarrassed. She has to yank on Serena's hand to pull her away, dragging her upstairs and into her bedroom, out of sight. If Blair's mother saw, she thinks, she would be so hurt. She treats Serena like a daughter.

Blair begins to see Serena less. On weeknights, or when Blair has to study for a test, Serena goes out without her. She calls different people — Georgina, who goes to a different school and knows people with pills.

Sometimes, Blair tells Serena she has to study and then calls Nate. They lie on Blair's bed and eat ice cream, talk, watch a movie. They're at the age where the talking is shy.

At school, though, they are still inseparable. Over lunch, Blair tells Serena that she likes Nate, and like the good friend she is, Serena hears the unsaid. This thing is mine, this one thing. 

 

 

"Don't you think she's kind of a slut?" ventures Penelope, one night when Serena is not around. Penelope is new, so she doesn't know better. "Chuck Bass said..."

Blair doesn't even let her finish. "And what were you doing with Chuck Bass?" she snips. "Playing Scrabble?"

Penelope is new, so she doesn't know: Blair is Serena's lieutenant, her pitbull. Nobody says anything bad about Serena when Blair is around to hear it.

 

 

Serena calls one night, late. I think I might be gay, she says.

Don't be stupid, Blair says. Blair is the only person who is allowed to say this to Serena, and she does it often. This is just another way Serena has to be different, does she have to remind her how many boys she's slept with that month alone? God, she laughs, don't tell me you're in love with me or something.

Later: they've just watched _Pretty Woman_ for the first time, drinking sparkling wine, and when Serena moves to kiss her Blair stops her mouth with fingers. Not on the lips, she blurts out. Serena vaguely wonders whether to be insulted, but she's burning hot enough not to stop.

Blair pretends to fall asleep immediately after, and it never happens again.

 

 

Blair and Nate start dating for real. He picks her up in his dad's car and takes her for dinner at Per Se.  He does everything right, dutifully helping her off with her coat and pulling back her seat at the table. He kisses her goodnight and Blair almost faints with pleasure.

Almost as good is the next day at school, telling the story while Kati and Iz coo in all the right places. Serena has stories too, Serena always has stories, but she waits respectfully until Blair is finished before taking back her audience. In fifth period French, Penelope, who spends an hour every morning blowdrying and scrunching her hair to look like Serena's, deigns to ask Blair where she bought her headband. For almost half a day, it feels like the whole world revolves around Blair, Blair, Blair.

 

 

Serena models some clothes for Les Best and the photos get plastered all over New York. She saturates the city, stretched sky high on buildings, running past on the side of buses.

 

 

I love you, Serena says, the summer they're sixteen, when Blair is called away to her aunt's wedding in Scotland.

Miss me, bitch, says Blair. Text me.

She spends three weeks in a mouldering Scottish castle. The first two weeks, Serena emails every day. One day, Blair counts seven emails and sixteen texts. She sends photos too, of her freshly painted toenails, of outfits in the changing room at Barney's. Of Kati's mom's baby shower, of her new dress for the Shepherd wedding. She sends a pic of her and all the girls, crowded round a table at Butter. _We miss you!_

When Serena stops emailing, Blair thinks nothing of it. She rolls her eyes, annoyed but affectionate. Serena is like this. She burns out. She is easily distracted.

But the next day Blair's phone is flooded with texts, buzzing and chiming. _Where is Serena? Where'd she go? Have u heard anything?_

When she calls, there is no answer. She calls Eric, then Lily. Feels panic rise in her throat. Serena vanished is bad news.

Lily picks up on the second try. Serena is gone. She moved to Connecticut.

What, Lily says, astounded. She didn't tell you?

Blair waits til she gets back to deliver the news to Kati and Iz. They lean across the table, agog with shock. Penelope's eyebrows nearly disappear into her bangs.

 

 

Serena never calls. Blair starts to make up her own stories. Then, a week later, Blair's mother catches her father with another man, and Serena is no longer the topic of scandal.

The queen is dead. Long live the queen.


End file.
